History of the People’s Republic of China

1949–1976, The Mao Era Revolution Korean War Zhen Fan Three-anti/five-anti campaigns Hundred Flowers Campaign Anti-Rightist Movement Great Leap Forward Great Chinese Famine Cultural Revolution Lin Biao Gang of Four Tiananmen Incident 1976–1989, Era of Reconstruction Economic reform Sino-Vietnamese War Tiananmen protests 1989–2002, A Rising Power One country, two systems Hong Kong (post 1997) Macau (post 1999) Chinese reunification 2002–present, China Today Sichuan Earthquake The Beijing Olympics Shanghai 2010 Expo

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This box: view · talk · edit [show]History of China

Propaganda poster of the era

The Great Leap Forward (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dà yuè jìn) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China (CPC), reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China’s vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization, industrialization, and collectivization. Mao Zedong led the campaign based on the Theory of Productive Forces, and intensified it after being informed of the impending disaster from grain shortages. In less than twelve months 900 million Chinese peasants were moved into enormous collective farms, becoming the greatest mobilization of human beings the world has ever seen.^[1]

Chief changes in the lives of rural Chinese included the introduction of a mandatory process of agricultural collectivization, which was introduced incrementally. Private farming was prohibited, and those engaged in it were labeled as counter revolutionaries and persecuted. Restrictions on rural people were enforced through public struggle sessions, and social pressure. Rural industrialization, officially a priority of the campaign, saw “its development … aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward.”^[2]

The Great Leap ended in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths.^[3] Estimates of the death toll range from 16.5 to 46 million,^[4][5][6] with estimates by demographic specialists ranging from 18 to 32.5 million.^[7] Historian Frank Dikötter asserts that “coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history.”^[8]

The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958-61 being the only years between 1953 and 1983 in which China’s economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues, “enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. … In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.”^[9]

In subsequent conferences in 1960 and 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward were studied by the CPC, and Mao was criticized in the party conferences. Party members less economically left-wing like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, and Mao was marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

[edit]Background

In October 1949 after the defeat of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Immediately, landlords and wealthier peasants had their land holdings forcibly redistributed to poorer peasants. In the agricultural sectors, crops deemed by the Party to be “full of evil” such as the opium crop, were destroyed and replaced with crops such as rice. Within the Party, there was major debate about redistribution.

A moderate faction within the party and Politburo member Liu Shaoqi argued that change should be gradual and any collectivization of the peasantry should wait until industrialization, which could provide the agricultural machinery for mechanized farming. A more radical faction led byMao Zedong agreed that the best way to finance industrialization was for the government to take control of agriculture, thereby establishing a monopoly over grain distribution and supply. This would allow the state to buy at a low price and sell much higher, thus raising the capital necessary for the industrialization of the country.

[edit]Agricultural collectives

It was realized that this policy would be unpopular with the peasants and therefore it was proposed that the peasants should be brought under Party control by the establishment of agricultural collectives which would also facilitate the sharing of tools and draft animals. This policy was gradually pushed through between 1949 and 1958, first by establishing “mutual aid teams” of 5-15 households, then in 1953 “elementary agricultural cooperatives” of 20-40 households, then from 1956 in “higher co-operatives” of 100-300 families. These reforms (sometimes now referred to as The Great Leap Forward) were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they “voluntarily” agreed to join the collective.^{[citation needed]}

Besides these economic changes, the Party implemented major social changes in the countryside including the banishing of all religious and mystic institutions and ceremonies and replacing them with political meetings and propaganda sessions. Attempts were made to enhance rural education and the status of women (allowing females to initiate divorce if they desired) and ending foot-binding, child marriage and opium addiction. Internal passports (called the hukou system) were introduced in 1956, forbidding travel without appropriate authorization. Highest priority was given to the urban proletariat for whom a welfare state was created.

The first phase of collectivization was not a great success and there was widespread famine in 1956, though the Party’s propaganda machine announced progressively higher harvests. Moderates within the Party, including Zhou Enlai, argued for a reversal ofcollectivization. The position of the moderates was strengthened by Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret speech at the 20th Congress which uncovered Stalin’s crimes and highlighted the failure of his agricultural policies including collectivization in the USSR.

[edit]Hundred Flowers Campaign

In 1957 Mao responded to the tensions in the Party by promoting free speech and criticism under the 100 Flowers Campaign. In retrospect, some have come to argue that this was a ploy to allow critics of the regime, primarily intellectuals but also low ranking members of the party critical of the agricultural policies, to identify themselves.^[10] Some claim that Mao simply swung to the side of the hard-liners once his policies gained strong opposition. Once he had done so, at least half a million were purged under the Anti-Rightist campaign, which effectively silenced any opposition from within the Party or from agricultural experts to the changes which would be implemented under the Great Leap Forward.

By the completion of the first 5 Year Economic Plan in 1957, Mao had come to doubt that the path to socialism that had been taken by the Soviet Union was appropriate for China. He was critical of Khrushchev’s reversal of Stalinist policies and alarmed by the uprisings that had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the perception that the USSR was seeking “Peaceful coexistence” with the Western powers. Mao had become convinced that China should follow its own path to Communism.

According to Jonathan Mirsky, a historian and journalist specializing in Chinese affairs, China’s isolation from most of the rest of the world, along with the Korean War, had accelerated Mao’s attacks on his perceived domestic enemies. It led him to accelerate his designs to develop an economy where the regime would get maximum benefit from rural taxation.^[11]

Before the Great Leap, peasants farmed their own small pockets of land, and observed traditional practices connected to markets—festivals, banquets, and paying homage to ancestors.^[11] Starting in 1954, peasants were encouraged to form and join collectives, which would putatively increase their efficiency without robbing them of their own land or restricting their livelihoods.^[11] By 1958, however, private ownership was entirely abolished and households all over China were forced into state-operated communes. Mao insisted that the communes must produce more grain for the cities and earn foreign exchange from exports.^[11]

[edit]Organizational and operational factors

Propaganda poster of the steel production objective. The text reads: “Take steel as the key link, leap forward in all fields“, the text below is pinyin.

The Great Leap Forward campaign began during the period of the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1958–1963, though the campaign itself was discontinued by 1961.^[12][13] Mao unveiled the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in Nanjing.

The central idea behind the Great Leap was that rapid development of China’s agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labour and avoid having to import heavy machinery. The Chinese Communist leadership also sought to avoid both social stratification and technical bottlenecks involved in the Soviet model of development, but sought political rather than technical solutions to do so. Distrusting technical experts,^[14] Mao and the party sought to replicate the strategies used in its 1930s regrouping in Yan’an following the Long March: “mass mobilization, social leveling, attacks on bureaucratism, [and] disdain for material obstacles.”^[15] Mao advocated that a further round of collectivization modeled on the USSR‘s “Third Period” was necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives would be merged into huge People’s Communes.

[edit]People’s communes

In the beginning, commune members were able to eat for free at the commune canteens. This changed when food production slowed to a halt.

An experimental commune was established at Chayashan in Henan in April 1958. Here for the first time private plots were entirely abolished and communal kitchens were introduced. At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people’s communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. By the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set up, with an average of 5,000 households each. The communes were relatively self sufficient co-operatives where wages and money were replaced by work points.

Based on his fieldwork, Ralph A. Thaxton Jr. describes the people’s communes as a form of “apartheid system” for Chinese farm households. The commune system was aimed at maximizing production for provisioning the cities and constructing offices, factories, schools, and social insurance systems for urban-dwelling workers, cadres and officials. Citizens in rural areas who criticized the system were labeled “dangerous.” Escape was also difficult or impossible, and those who attempted were denied by “party-orchestrated public struggle,” which further jeopardized their survival.^[16] Besides agriculture, communes also incorporated some light industry and construction projects.

[edit]Industrialization

People in the countryside working at night to produce steel.

Mao saw grain and steel production as the key pillars of economic development. He forecast that within 15 years of the start of the Great Leap, China’s steel production would surpass that of the UK. In the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the increase coming through backyard steel furnaces.^{[citation needed]} Major investments in larger state enterprises were made in 1958-60: 1,587, 1,361, and 1,815 medium- and large-scale state projects were started in 1958, 1959, and 1960 respectively, more in each year than in the first Five Year Plan.^[17]

Millions of Chinese became state workers as a consequence of this unprecedented industrial investment: in 1958, 21 million were added to non-agricultural state payrolls, and total state employment reached a peak of 50.44 million in 1960, more than doubling the 1957 level; the urban population swelled by 31.24 million people.^[18] These new workers placed major stress on China’s food-rationing system, which led to increased and unsustainable demands on rural food production.^[18]

During this rapid expansion, coordination suffered and material shortages were frequent, resulting in “a huge rise in the wage bill, largely for construction workers, but no corresponding increase in manufactured goods.”^[19] Facing a massive deficit, the government cut industrial investment from 38.9 to 7.1 billion yuan from 1960 to 1962 (an 82% decrease; the 1957 level was 14.4 billion).^[19]

[edit]Backyard furnaces

Backyard furnaces in China during the Great Leap Forward era.

With no personal knowledge of metallurgy, Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui in September 1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng^{[citation needed]}. The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel (though in fact the finished steel had probably been manufactured elsewhere).^{[citation needed]}

Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants’ houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the “scrap” for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals. Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth, Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants.

Moreover, the experience of the intellectual classes following the Hundred Flowers Campaign silenced those aware of the folly of such a plan. According to his private doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he found out that high quality steel could only be produced in large scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal. However, he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later in that year.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale, but often on poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works often built without input from trained engineers. Mao was well aware of the human cost of these water-conservancy campaigns. In early 1958, while listening to a report on irrigation in Jiangsu, he mentioned that:

“Wu Zhipu claims he can move 30 billion cubic metres; I think 30,000 people will die. Zeng Xisheng has said that he will move 20 billion cubic metres, and I think that 20,000 people will die. Weiqing only promises 600 million cubic metres, maybe nobody will die.”^[20][21]

Though Mao “criticized the excessive use of corvée for large-scale water conservancy projects” in late 1958,^[22] mass mobilization on irrigation works continued unabated for the next several years, and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of exhausted, starving villagers.^[20] The inhabitants of Qingshui and Gansu referred to these projects as the “killing fields.”^[20]

[edit]Crop experiments

Chinese propaganda poster showing larger-than-human melon

On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers. The policies included close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more densely than normal on the incorrect assumption that seeds of the same class would not compete with each other.^{[citation needed]}Deep plowing (up to 2m deep) was encouraged on the mistaken belief that this would yield plants with extra large root systems. Moderately productive land was left unplanted with the belief that concentrating manure and effort on the most fertile land would lead to large per-acre productivity gains. Altogether, these untested innovations generally led to decreases in grain production rather than increases.^[23]

Meanwhile, local leaders were pressured into falsely reporting ever-higher grain production figures to their political superiors. Participants at political meetings remembered production figures being inflated up to 10 times actual production amounts as the race to please superiors and win plaudits – like the chance to meet Mao himself – intensified. The state was later able to force many production groups to sell more grain than they could spare based on these false production figures.^[24]

The initial impact of the Great Leap Forward was discussed at the Lushan Conference in July/August 1959. Although many of the more moderate leaders had reservations about the new policy, the only senior leader to speak out openly was Marshall Peng Dehuai. Mao used the conference to dismiss Peng from his post as Defence Minister and denounce both Peng (who came from a poor peasant family) and his supporters as “bourgeois,” and launch a nationwide campaign against “rightist opportunism.” Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, who began a systematic purge of Peng’s supporters from the military.

[edit]Treatment of villagers

The ban on private holdings ruined peasant life at its most basic level, according to Mirsky. Villagers were unable to secure enough food to go on living, because the traditional means of being able to rent, sell, or use their land as collateral for loans was deprived of them by the commune system.^[11] In one village, once the commune was operational the Party boss and his colleagues “swung into manic action, herding villagers into the fields to sleep and to work intolerable hours, and forcing them to walk, starving, to distant additional projects.”^[11]

Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Paul Pickowicz, a historian at the University of California at San Diego, and Mark Selden, a sociologist at Binghamton University, wrote about the dynamic of interaction between the Party and villagers:

Beyond attack, beyond question, was the systemic and structured dynamic of the socialist state that intimidated and impoverished millions of patriotic and loyal villagers.^[25]

The authors present a similar picture to Thaxton in depicting the Communist Party’s destruction of the traditions of Chinese villagers. Traditionally prized local customs were deemed signs of “feudalism” to be extinguished, according to Mirsky. “Among them were funerals, weddings, local markets, and festivals. The Party thus destroyed ‘much that gave meaning to Chinese lives. These private bonds were social glue. To mourn and to celebrate is to be human. To share joy, grief, and pain is humanizing.'”^[26] Failure to participate in the CPC’s political campaigns—though the aims of such campaigns were often conflicting—”could result in detention, torture, death, and the suffering of entire families.”^[26]

Public criticism sessions were often used to intimidate the peasants into obeying local cadres; they increased the death rate of the famine in several ways, according to Thaxton. “In the first case, blows to the body caused internal injuries that, in combination with physical emaciation and acute hunger, could induce death.” In one case, after a peasant stole two cabbages from the common fields, the thief was publicly criticized for half a day. He collapsed, fell ill, and never recovered. Others were sent to labor camps.^[27]

However, J. G. Mahoney, Professor of Liberal Studies and East Asian Studies at Grand Valley State University, has said that “there is too much diversity and dynamism in the country for one work to capture … rural China as if it were one place.”

Mahoney describes an elderly man in rural Shanxi who recalls Mao fondly, saying “Before Mao we sometimes ate leaves, after liberation we did not.” However, he points out that Da Fo villagers recall the Great Leap as a period of famine and death, and among those who survived in Da Fo were precisely those who could digest leaves.^[28]

[edit]Modes of resistance

According to over 20 years of research by Ralph Thaxton, professor of politics at Brandeis University, villagers turned against the CPC during and after the Great Leap, seeing it as autocratic, brutal, corrupt, and mean-spirited.^[11] The CPC’s policies, which included plunder, forced labor, and starvation, according to Thaxton, led villagers “to think about their relationship with the Communist Party in ways that do not bode well for the continuity of socialist rule.”^[11]

Often, villagers composed doggerel to show their defiance to the regime, and “perhaps, to remain sane.” During the Great Leap, one jingle ran: “Flatter shamelessly—eat delicacies…. Don’t flatter—starve to death for sure.”^[26]

[edit]Climate conditions and famine

Propaganda poster displaying the production of grains skyrocketing.

Despite the harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labour diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign. Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the new innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans. Foreign aid was refused. When the Japanese foreign minister told his Chinese counterpart Chen Yi of an offer of 100,000 tonnes of wheat to be shipped out of public view, he was rebuffed. John F Kennedy was also aware that the Chinese were exporting food to Africa and Cuba during the famine and said “we’ve had no indication from the Chinese Communists that they would welcome any offer of food.”^[29]

In 1959 and 1960 the weather was less favorable, and the situation got considerably worse, with many of China’s provinces experiencing severe famine. Droughts, floods, and general bad weather caught China completely by surprise. In July 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China. According to the Disaster Center,^[30] it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 2 million people.

In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land, while an estimated 60 percent of northern agricultural land received no rain at all.^[31]

With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where, as a result of drastically inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao’s reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China’s most populous provinces, known in China as “Heaven’s Granary” because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao’s reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.^[32]

The agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward and the associated famine would then continue until January 1961, where, at the Ninth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, the restoration of agricultural production through a reversal of the Great Leap policies was started. Grain exports were stopped, and imports from Canada and Australia helped to reduce the impact of the food shortages, at least in the coastal cities.

[edit]Consequences

As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. The official toll of excess deaths recorded in China for the years of the Great Leap Forward is 14 million, but as of 1987, scholars had estimated the number of victims to be between 20 and 43 million.^[33]

The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the “Three Bitter Years” and the Three Years of Natural Disasters. Many local officials were tried and publicly executed for giving out misinformation.^[34]

Thaxton’s final judgement of the effect on villagers of the famine was that “Village people… had come to associate socialism with starvation and the agents of the party-state with the specter of death.”^[11]

[edit]Deaths by starvation

Starting in the early 1980s, critics of the Great Leap added quantitative muscle to their arsenal. U.S. government employee Judith Banister published what became an influential article in the China Quarterly, and since then estimates as high as 30 million deaths in the Great Leap became common in the U.S. press. Wim F Wertheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, disagrees with the numbers presented on the basis that they lack scientific support.^[35] Critics of this position point to the numerous studies by individuals such as Aird in 1982, Ashton et al. in 1984, and Peng in 1987 that specifically sought to quantify the Great Leap’s demographic impact. A lingering problem that all scholars point to is the assumptions regarding birth rate used in the most widely cited projections of famine deaths. These assumptions make it difficult to gauge the death toll with a high degree of accuracy.

Dr Ping-ti Ho, professor of history at the University of Chicago and an expert in Chinese Demography, in a book titled Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Harvard East Asian Studies No 4, 1959), also mentioned numerous flaws in the 1953 census on which famine death projections are made, though acknowledging the lack of more accurate sources.

Critics of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday‘s book Mao: The Unknown Story often cite these studies as evidence that their body count (38 million) may be exaggerated. However, sinologist Stuart Schram believes their estimate “may well be the most accurate.”^[36] Jung Chang argues that “Mao had actually allowed for many more deaths. Although slaughter was not his purpose with the Leap, he was more than ready for myriad deaths to result, and had hinted to his top echelon that they should not be too shocked if they happened.”^[37] In light of evidence provided in their book, R.J. Rummel believes that the mass dyings associated with Great Leap Forward now constitute “democide” and revised his democide total for thePeople’s Republic of China from 35 million to 77 million.^[38]

One authoritative account of the famine, a 1,100-page study by Yang Jisheng, a long-time communist party member and a reporter for the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, puts the number of deaths from the Great Chinese Famine at 36 million. His book, entitled Tombstone (Mùbēi, 2008), challenges the official Communist Party line that the famine was largely a result of “Three Years of Natural Disasters” and he puts the blame squarely on Maoist policies, such as diverting agricultural workers to steel production instead of growing crops, and exporting grain at the same time.^[39][40] During the course of his research, Yang uncovered that some 22 million tons of grain was held in public granaries at the height of the famine, reports of the starvation went up the bureaucracy only to be ignored by top officials, and the authorities ordered that statistics be destroyed in regions where population decline became evident.^[41] Economist Steven Rosefielde argues that Yang’s account “shows that Mao’s slaughter was caused in considerable part by terror-starvation; that is, voluntary manslaughter (and perhaps murder) rather than innocuous famine.”^[42]

Another account by the aforementioned historian Frank Dikötter (Mao’s Great Famine, 2010), which is based on recently accessible Chinese archival sources, places the death toll even higher, at 45 million minimum.^[6] He claims that the census figures, which point to a death toll between 15 and 32 million, are largely inadequate, and that public security reports and secret reports collated by party committees towards the end of the Great Leap indicate the human cost was far greater.^[6] He also notes that “Some historians speculate that the true figure stands as high as 50 to 60 million people.”^[6]

Yang notes that local party officials were indifferent to the large number of people dying around them, as their primary concern was the delivery of grain, which Mao wanted to use to pay back debts to the USSR totaling 1.973 billion yuan. In Xinyang, people died of starvation at the doors of grain warehouses.^[43] Mao refused to open the state granaries as he dismissed reports of food shortages and accused the peasants of hiding grain.^[44]

Mao and the Communist Party knew that some of their policies were contributing to the starvation.^[45] Foreign minister Chen Yi said of some of the early human losses in November 1958^[46]:

“Casualties have indeed appeared among workers, but it is not enough to stop us in our tracks. This is the price we have to pay, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Who knows how many people have been sacrificed on the battlefields and in the prisons [for the revolutionary cause]? Now we have a few cases of illness and death: it’s nothing!”

During a secret meeting in Shanghai in 1959, Mao demanded the state procurement of one-third of all grain to feed the cities and satisfy foreign clients, and noted that “If you don’t go above a third, people won’t rebel.” He also stated at the same meeting^[47]:

“When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Like in the USSR during the famine of 1932-33, peasants were confined to their starving villages by a system of household registration,^[48] and the worst effects of the famine were directed against enemies of the regime.^[49] Those labeled as “black elements” (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in any previous campaign were given the lowest priority in the allocation of food, and therefore died in the greatest numbers.^[49] According to genocide scholar Adam Jones, “no group suffered more than the Tibetans,” with perhaps one in five dying from 1959 to 1962.^[50]

Fuyang, a region with a population of 8 million in 1958, had a death rate that rivaled Democratic Kampuchea’s Killing Fields.^[51] More than 2.4 million people perished there over the next three years.^[52]

However the experience across China was by no means uniform. Mobo Gao, Professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Adelaide, lived through the Great Leap Forward and writes that in his home village in Jiangxi Province, there was a famine, but no one actually died of starvation.^[53]

[edit]Deaths by violence

Not all deaths during the Great Leap were from starvation. Benjamin Valentino notes that “communist officials sometimes tortured and killed those accused of failing to meet their grain quota.”^[49] Frank Dikötter estimates that at least 2.5 million people were beaten or tortured to death and 1 to 3 million committed suicide.^[54] He provides some illustrative examples. InXinyang, where over a million died in 1960, 6-7 percent (around 67,000) of these were beaten to death by the militias. In Daoxian county, 10 per cent of those who died had been “buried alive, clubbed to death or otherwise killed by party members and their militia.” In Shimen county, around 13,500 died in 1960, of these 12 per cent were “beaten or driven to their deaths.”^[55]

Beatings with sticks was the most common method used by local cadres (roughly half of all cadres regularly pummeled or caned people), but others devised harsher means to humiliate and torture those who failed to keep up. As mass starvation set in, ever greater violence had to be inflicted in order to coerce malnourished people to labor in the fields. Victims were buried alive, thrown bound into ponds, stripped naked and forced to labor in the middle of winter, doused in boiling water, forced to ingest excrement and urine, and subjected to mutilation (hair ripped out, noses and ears lopped off). In Guangdong, some cadres injected salt water into their victims with needles normally reserved for cattle.^[56]

[edit]Impact on economy

During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew. Iron production increased 45% in 1958 and a combined 30% over the next two years, but plummeted in 1961, and did not reach the previous 1958 level until 1964.

The Great Leap also led to the greatest destruction of real estate in human history, outstripping any of the bombing campaigns from World War II.^[57] Approximately 30 to 40 per cent of all houses were turned to rubble.^[58] Frank Dikötter states that “homes were pulled down to make fertilizer, to build canteens, to relocate villagers, to straighten roads, to make place for a better future beckoning ahead or simply to punish their owners.”^[57]

In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo argues: “Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms subsequent to 1978.)”^[59]

Despite the risks to their careers, some Communist Party members openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise and applying bourgeois methods in developing the economy. Liu Shaoqi made a speech in 1962 at Seven Thousand Man’s Assembly criticizing that “The economic disaster was 30% fault of nature, 70% human error.”^[60]

[edit]Impact on the government

Mao stepped down as State Chairman of the PRC in 1959, predicting he would take most of the blame for the failure of the Great Leap Forward, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the CPC. Liu Shaoqi (the new PRC Chairman) and reformist Deng Xiaoping (CPC General Secretary) were left in charge to change policy to bring about economic recovery. Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy came under open criticism at the Lushan party conference. The attack was led by Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai, who, initially troubled by the potentially adverse effect of the Great Leap Forward on the modernization of the armed forces, also admonished unnamed party members for trying to “jump into communism in one step.” After the Lushan showdown, Mao defensively replaced Peng with Lin Biao.

However, in June 1962, the party held an enlarged Central Work Conference and rehabilitated the majority of the deposed comrades who had criticized Mao in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. The event was again discussed, with much self-criticism, with the contemporary government calling it a “serious [loss] to our country and people” and blaming the cult of personality of Mao. Following the 1962 conference, Mao became a “dead ancestor”, as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party.^{[dubious – discuss]} He launched a vain attempt for influence in 1966 with the Cultural Revolution, but died ten years later, leaving the forces within the party that opposed the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward in power.^{[dubious – discuss][61]}

[edit]Alternative interpretations

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The estimations vary largely because of inaccurate data, thanks to inaccurate census as well as the efforts of the government to hide the actual situation (all the related data was classified as extremely confidential until their disclosure after 1983). Some people question the validity of any of these estimates on the grounds of “the absence of reliable country-wide population census”. As Wim F Wertheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, put it in the article “Wild Swans and Mao’s Agrarian Strategy”;

Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s “between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese” appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability…it is hard to believe that suddenly, within a rather short period (1953-1960), the total population of China had risen from 450 [million] to 600 million.^[62]

Other scholars have cautioned against taking a one-sided approach to the issue, and to see the issue in a wider context. For example Mobo Gao suggested that the Great Leap Forward did in fact have its own logic and rationality, and that its terrible effects came not from malign intent on the part of the Chinese leadership at the time, but instead relate to the structural nature of its rule, and the vastness of China as a country. Gao says “..the terrible lesson learnt is that China is so huge and when it is uniformly ruled, follies or wrong policies will have grave implications of tremendous magnitude”.^[53]

Others have suggested that while China did undoubtedly experience large numbers of famine deaths in the years 1958 to 1961, this toll has to be evaluated in light of the overall impressive achievement of Maoist China in dramatically improving life expectancy. Gao quotes figures showing that the Maoist revolution gave an estimated net positive value of 35 billion extra years of life to the Chinese people.^[63]

Former Chinese dissident and political prisoner, Minqi Li, a Marxist Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, has produced data showing that even the peak death rates during the Great Leap Forward were in fact quite typical in pre-Communist China. Li (2008) argues that based on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949. ^[64]

[edit]See also

• Virgin Lands Campaign, contemporary program in the Soviet Union

[edit]References

This article incorporates public domain text from the United States Library of Congress Country Studies. – China

[edit]Bibliography and further reading

• Bachman, David (1991). Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Becker, Jasper (1998). Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 0805056688
• Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. (2005) Mao: The Unknown Story, Knopf. ISBN 0679422714
• Dikötter, Frank (2010). Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62. Walker & Company. ISBN 0802777686
• Li, Wei, and Dennis Tao Yang (2005). The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster. Journal of Political Economy 113 (4):840-877.
• Li, Zhisui (1996). The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Arrow Books Ltd.
• Macfarquhar, Roderick (1983). Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Vol 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Short, Philip (2001). Mao: A Life. Owl Books. ISBN 0805066381
• Tao Yang, Dennis. (2008) “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Comparison to Soviet Famines.” Palgrave MacMillan, Comparative Economic Studies50, pp. 1–29.
• Thaxton. Ralph A. Jr (2008). Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521722306
• Wertheim, Wim F (1995). Third World whence and whither? Protective State versus Aggressive Market. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. 211 pp. ISBN 9055890820
• E. L Wheelwright, Bruce McFarlane, and Joan Robinson (Foreword), The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of the Cultural Revolution.
• Yang, Dali (1996). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press.
• Yang, Jisheng (2008). Tombstone (Mu Bei – Zhong Guo Liu Shi Nian Dai Da Ji Huang Ji Shi). Cosmos Books (Tian Di Tu Shu), Hong Kong.
• Gao. Mobo (2007). Gao Village: Rural life in modern China. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3792-9
• Gao. Mobo (2008). The Battle for China’s Past. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-2780-8
• Li. Minqi (2008). The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy. Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-1-58367-182-5

[edit]External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Great Leap Forward

• Dikotter, Frank (2010-12-15) Mao’s Great Leap to Famine, New York Times
• McGregor, Richard. The man who exposed Mao’s secret famine. The Financial Times. June 12, 2010.
• Ian Johnson. Finding the Facts About Mao’s Victims. The New York Review of Books (Blog), December 20, 2010

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